New EPA Security Webinars and Black Sky Exercises
EPA’s Water Security Division has shared two upcoming webinars related to drinking water security, and an opportunity to host Black Sky Exercise.
EPA’s Power Outage Incident Action Checklist and Utility Case Study Webinar
This webinar will provide an overview of EPA’s new Power Outage Incident Action Checklist, which includes actions utilities can take to prepare for, respond to, and recover from power outages. It covers a range of activities including coordination, generators, fuel, operations, notifications, and documentation. The webinar will also include a presentation from Cape Fear Public Utility Authority on some of its best practices and lessons learned from responding to Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019.
DATE: Wednesday, November 6
TIME: 1:00 – 2:00 pm (Eastern)
REGISTER: Click here
Connecting Water Utilities and Emergency Management Agencies Webinar
Emergency management agencies and water utilities can work together to increase preparedness and help ensure that communities have essential drinking water and wastewater services during emergencies. This webinar will summarize best practices on how emergency management agencies and water utilities can coordinate to effectively respond to natural and man-made disasters. It will also highlight some of the collaborative activities between the Portland Water Bureau, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services wastewater and stormwater utility, and Portland Bureau of Emergency Management.
DATE: Thursday, November 14
TIME: 1:00 – 2:00 pm (Eastern)
REGISTER: Click here
Power and Black Sky Resilience Effort – Two Locations Needed
EPA is looking for TWO locations to conduct a Power and Black Sky Resilience Effort. At each location, EPA will engage with a group of utilities over a six to nine month period to facilitate progress on increasing resilience to short and long term power outages. The effort will consist of:
- One to two exercises to enable water utility participants to evaluate their preparedness for a long duration power outage (e.g., generators, fuel, communication, supply chain) and identify challenges and improvement actions.
- Three webinars on power resilience topics identified by exercise participants.
- Four improvement planning teleconferences to track progress on improvement planning activities identified during the exercises.
- A workshop to showcase some of the best practices, lessons learned, and improvement activities. The workshop will include national experts to further explore some of the power resilience challenges identified and discussed in previous activities. If you are interested, please email Lauren Wisniewski for more information Wisniewski.Lauren@epa.gov.
